Sir Frederick MADDEN’S energetic researches and labours for the improvement of the Collection of MSS. would well merit a fuller account than it is here practicable to give of them. They have been perseveringly and worthily continued by his successor, Mr. Edward Augustus BOND, to whom students also owe the great and distinctive debt of the commencement of an admirable “INDEX OF MATTERS” to the Collection generally. No greater boon, in the way of Catalogues, was ever given within the walls of the Museum, though, as yet, it is necessarily a beginning only. The special labours of Dr. GRAY in that sphere, for the Natural-History Collections, comprised the extended advantage of printing and sale. Not less, I hope, will eventually be done for the service of manuscript students. There is the desire to do it, and the means must, sooner or later, follow. The wonderful growth and development of the Collections of Antiquities in recent years is the special subject of the next chapter. That growth derives no small part of its permanent scientific interest and value from the impressive way in which it illustrates the teachings of Holy Scripture. _Some_ of the collections amassed in the British Museum have, more than once, by dint of human vanity, been made to subserve a laudation of the wonderful achievements of Man, rather than of the power, wisdom, and goodness of God; but for the ebullitions of human vanity there is extremely little room when a visitor stands beside the sculptured memorials of that vast empire which ‘the cedars in the garden of GOD could not hide,’ [Sidenote: Ezek. xxxi, 8 to 13. Comp. Habak. ii, 14.] which was ‘lifted up in the pride of its height,’ only to become a marvel for desolation, so that upon its ruin ‘the fowls of the heaven remain.’ When before our own eyes and ears the very stones cry out in the wall, and the beams out of the timber answer them, the man vainest of his science or of his philosophy must needs be led to ask himself: ‘What hath GOD wrought?’ Some very advanced men of science have become, of late, fond of ‘Sunday-evening Lectures’ _for the instruction of the working classes_. That would be a tolerably impressive Sunday-evening Lecture which a competent scholar could give in the Assyrian Gallery of the British Museum. Here, and now, the recent increase of the Department of Antiquities may be wholly passed over. But to that part of the history of accessions which bears upon the Natural-History Galleries some attention must needs be given, by way of continuing our former brief epitome of the improvements made between the years 1836 and 1850. Of the state of the Department of Zoology, during the earlier part of the decade now more immediately under review, a good and instructive account was given in Professor OWEN’S Annual Report of 1861. Its most material portions run thus:—